The world energy crisis has renewed the emphasis on mining coal as a primary source of energy, both domestically and abroad. In order to obtain coal economically from deep sources where most coal reserves are now located, there is an urgent need to modernize and improve on traditional mining methods and machinery which are costly, inefficient and notoriously hazardous to human life. Also, it is known that traditional mining procedures recover only about 50%-55% of existing coal from deep mines, which is intolerably wasteful in the present day economy.
Ideally, a mining method for deeply embedded coal or other solid minerals involves the recovery of substantially all coal from a given subterranean location without the necessity for human workers to descend below ground level during the mining operations. It is therefore the primary object of this invention to provide a coal mining method and apparatus for practicing the method which will closely approximate the ideal in terms of the above economics and safety requirements.